Please note that any orders related to theses or dissertations, as well as their parts or chapters, are only available for third or fourth year academic levels or higher.

Total price:
$12.00

Plato, Gorgias, in Cooper 1997.

Plato (429?–347 B.C.E.) is, by any reckoning, one of the mostdazzling writers in the Western literary tradition and one of the mostpenetrating, wide-ranging, and influential authors in the history ofphilosophy. An Athenian citizen of high status, he displays in hisworks his absorption in the political events and intellectual movementsof his time, but the questions he raises are so profound and thestrategies he uses for tackling them so richly suggestive andprovocative that educated readers of nearly every period have in someway been influenced by him, and in practically every age there havebeen philosophers who count themselves Platonists in some importantrespects. He was not the first thinker or writer to whom the word“philosopher” should be applied. But he was soself-conscious about how philosophy should be conceived, and what itsscope and ambitions properly are, and he so transformed theintellectual currents with which he grappled, that the subject ofphilosophy, as it is often conceived—a rigorous and systematicexamination of ethical, political, metaphysical, and epistemologicalissues, armed with a distinctive method—can be called hisinvention. Few other authors in the history of Western philosophy approximatehim in depth and range: perhaps only Aristotle (who studied with him),Aquinas, and Kant would be generally agreed to be of the same rank.

Gorgias | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

His role is simply to present the challenge these criticalinsights lead to; for immoralism as part of a positive vision, we needto turn to Callicles in the Gorgias.

SparkNotes: Gorgias: General Summary

That is not true unless Plato is thinking only of rational people. Because Gorgias has said that a rhetorician is able persuade to belief (rather than instruct to knowledge) an irrational patient to accept the treatment the doctor has prescribed for him even though the doctor himself cannot instruct the patient to knowledge (456b).

Gorgias > By Individual Philosopher > Philosophy

The best way to form a reasonable conjecture about why Plato wroteany given work in the form of a dialogue is to ask: what would be lost,were one to attempt to re-write this work in a way that eliminated thegive-and-take of interchange, stripped the characters of theirpersonality and social markers, and transformed the result intosomething that comes straight from the mouth of its author? This isoften a question that will be easy to answer, but the answer might varygreatly from one dialogue to another. In pursuing this strategy, wemust not rule out the possibility that some of Plato's reasons forwriting this or that work in the form of a dialogue will also be hisreason for doing so in other cases—perhaps some of his reasons,so far as we can guess at them, will be present in all other cases. Forexample, the use of character and conversation allows an author toenliven his work, to awaken the interest of his readership, andtherefore to reach a wider audience. The enormous appeal of Plato'swritings is in part a result of their dramatic composition. Eventreatise-like compositions—Timaeus and Laws,for example—improve in readability because of theirconversational frame. Furthermore, the dialogue form allows Plato'sevident interest in pedagogical questions (how is it possible to learn?what is the best way to learn? from what sort of person can we learn?what sort of person is in a position to learn?) to be pursued not onlyin the content of his compositions but also in their form. Even inLaws such questions are not far from Plato's mind, as hedemonstrates, through the dialogue form, how it is possible for thecitizens of Athens, Sparta, and Crete to learn from each other byadapting and improving upon each other's social and politicalinstitutions.

The Internet Classics Archive | Meno by Plato

It is equally unrealistic to suppose that when Plato embarked on hiscareer as a writer, he made a conscious decision to put all of thecompositions that he would henceforth compose for a general readingpublic (with the exception of Apology) in the form of adialogue. If the question, “why did Plato writedialogues?”, which many of his readers are tempted to ask,pre-supposes that there must have been some such once-and-for-alldecision, then it is poorly posed. It makes better sense to break thatquestion apart into many little ones: better to ask, “Why didPlato write this particular work (for example:Protagoras, or Republic, or Symposium, orLaws) in the form of a dialogue—and that one(Timaeus, say) mostly in the form of a long andrhetorically elaborate single speech?” than to ask why he decidedto adopt the dialogue form.